The dinosaur experts aren't the only ones scoring big: paleontologists have announced fossil finds ranging from a teeny hedgehog to a massive seabird. Is summer the season for finding old bones?

Most Popular

As exciting as these announcements are, it's sad to say these discoveries aren't completely new. It takes years for a paleontologist to actually publish a scientific paper on a new species. For dinosaur expert Andrew Farke, nearly six years passed between finding the fossil and publishing about the new species. Compared to the hundreds of millions of years that the fossil was underground, I suppose six years isn't really that long of a time to wait. But for the researchers, it must have felt like eternity.

Happily, there really has been an uptick in dino discoveries over the past few decades, so we're not completely imagining this influx of fossils. Thanks to globalization, previously off-limit locales are now opened up for exploration. A fossil bed in northeastern China has been dubbed "Jurassic Park" because it is home to a multitude of fossils, and paleontologists are now finding new dinosaur bones all over the world—in Thailand, Madagascar, and Argentina, to name a few.

How many fossils are left to find? A 2006 study estimated that we've found only 28 percent of dinosaurs. So take heart. We'll be finding new dinosaurs with fluffy feathers, weird wings, small arms, frilly headdresses, and more strange features that we can't even imagine. And we'll be finding them for years to come.

Read This

The next logical step for VR is to capture our own motions in a new reality, and Oculus is already working on it. [via The Verge]